Oh, great, THIS frickin’ guy again.
So I saw this during the week of the Heartland International Film Festival, when it served as a sort of contrasting intermission between eight other smaller, better films. I was much more motivated to type about all of those first (along with two other delayed non-festival entries), but the MCC rule is every film I see in theaters gets its own entry.
[resigned sigh]
Just as the Transformers movies are an indefensible father/son tradition in our household (though the most recent one was arguably the best-ever), so are all the Marvel and DC mainstream superhero films of recent vintage. I haven’t skipped a Big Two comics-company event since the days of Catwoman and Elektra. I still haven’t seen Catwoman, Jonah Hex, and a handful of other stragglers — standing testimonies that I can say no. But in this era of superpowered abundance, I’ve been treating the subgenre as impellent despite any deterrents. As a comics collector since age six, I’ve kept up in my later years, seen them and judged for myself because…well, because they’re there, no matter how unenthusiastic I am about some of them.
Case in point: previously on Joker, Joaquin Phoenix was handed an Academy Award for his portrayal of dimwitted Arthur Fleck, a Dunning-Kruger poster child who fails upward from poverty, abuse, and miseducation into headline infamy as an obtuse murder-clown. The Hangover trilogy director Todd Phillips and his co-writer Scott Silver (8 Mile, The Fighter) remixed DC’s most overexposed supervillain into an Elseworlds based on a young Martin Scorsese’s then-contemporary, morally murky urban dramas — a grimdark period-piece homage with none of his insight, substituting bleakness for commentary, snarling at The System as an ineloquent reflex response, rewriting Batman’s origin worse, and avoiding the question of how exactly this specific loser would smarten up enough to become the Dark Knight Detective’s most challenging quarry in all his 80+ years of transmedia superstardom. Joker wasn’t the worst superhero film of 2019 (though that one also contained a Phoenix), but it might’ve been less grating if they’d scrubbed all the IP labels off with some Goo Gone and simply called it Clown Guy.
Phillips, Silver, and Phoenix reunite for one last geek-money heist with Joker: Folie à Deux, much of which repeats what they think worked. Just as the first one was a superhero movie in marketing only, the sequel is a single rewrite away from DC exile and shambles around in other genres. It’s a dull prison drama, a courtroom procedural minus procedures, and below all else a jukebox musical, that precious Pavlovian bait for entrenched oldies listeners that my wife and I recently heard a bona fide Broadway star sum up as “dumb stories with a lot of great songs”. It’s defiantly, grouchily anything but The Secret Origin of How Batman and Joker Became Mortal Enemies and Will Never Stop Punching Each Other.
What actually happens: Arthur’s rotting in Arkham Asylum until and unless authorities deem him sane enough to stand trial for all the murdering. Then he stands trial. A verdict is easily reached. 10-15 minutes of aftermath ensues. That’s it. Two hours and eighteen minutes’ worth of an Arthur Fleck ride-along, for those who think he’s fascinating and would fit right in with the film’s own parade of lowlife sycophants addled by reality TV, imagining themselves the world’s unappreciated underdogs but with a crippling misunderstanding of what “underdog” means.
Arkham itself is an inert setting, the sanitarium of Forman’s Amadeus overdosed on modern depressants and drawn out to an extended episode. Phillips avoids the layered ensemble complexities of Forman’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest — resisting the opportunity for another ripe, less hackneyed ’70s homage — and reduces its pre-Batman, uncostumed population to a horde of numbed zombies. Brendan Gleeson rustles up some energy as a capricious Irish guard, possibly this universe’s Dark Chief O’Hara, but as antagonists go, he’s no Nurse Ratched. The other patients/inmates are set dressing — potential victims, toadies, or background fillers so the whole thing’s not just Arthur wandering an empty mansion while writing more awful kid-jokes for his standup comeback.
The camera loves only one (1) other patient: fellow Academy Award Winner Lady Gaga (Best Original Song does count) as kindasorta technically faintly barely Harley Quinn. On Earth-Fleck she’s “Lee” Quinzel, a wan, fawning minx who might just be Arthur’s #1 fan and wants to watch the world burn. The details of her incarceration differ substantially from her multiversal counterparts and their groupie-kindling flirtation evinces absolutely none of the toxic relationship dynamic that made their dysfunctional couplehood so fascinating in the first place. “Lee” could just as easily have been Catwoman, Punchline, or any of Cesar Romero’s molls. That’s not to knock Gaga’s performance per se, though she has more musical numbers than dialogue and isn’t around much during the second half.
Arthur has no time for her by then (outside more songs, anyway) because that’s when all of Gotham tunes in for The Trial of the Millennium! Our Idiot doesn’t care much for his public defender (former indie actress Catherine Keener, last seen chewing sci-fi scenery in The Adam Project), so he fires her, insists on acting as his own attorney, and attends the entire trial in costume. Luckily for him, he’s in the court of Bill Smitrovich (Millennium, The Practice), the sort of judge who’s always angry yet wildly permissive because the movie needs him to allow some pretty stupid shenanigans. He has the aggravated demeanor of an honor-bound servant of the law whose career low was that one time he had to declare begrudgingly that the rulebook did indeed not specifically say dogs can’t play baseball.
Phillips’ heart clearly isn’t in wringing conflict from real-world legalities or convincing testimonies or witness revelations or any of the typical motives for filmmakers to enter courtrooms, real or fictional. Far more effort goes into the “jukebox musical” aspect, albeit with none of the panache of actual Broadway or the flamboyance of Moulin Rouge. The usual “crowd-pleasing” function of such profit-minded projects is dumped in favor of in-character, sometimes off-key karaoke, largely at random moments unmoored from emotional arcs. I don’t watch TV singing competitions and don’t necessarily brake for perfectly angelic voices (look, my music collection includes Henry Rollins and King Missile, okay?), but asking the star of the Oscar-nominated musical biopic Walk the Line and the winner of 13 Grammy Awards to go provocatively anti-musical is a waste of talent. As courtroom musicals go, it’s no Chicago. The glaring contrast of one scene, in which the cast watches a long excerpt from an old-timey classic musical, hints perhaps this is an Andy-Kaufmanesque satire and Phillips is hurting us on purpose.
Diehard Gaga fans may nonetheless love hearing her scaled-back approach, possibly a one-off lark that enticed her as a new challenge. To me she’s always seemed like a Madonna protege with far too many computers in the studio, but blessed with better acting skills. She was the MVP of A Star Is Born and House of Gucci, but just once I maybe ought to see her playing some role besides the Concerned Girlfriend of a broken, inferior male.
Despite the band playing on and on, I can’t recall the last time I sat in a theater and found myself so utterly bored by the final act. We get it, The System is broken, American life is rigged against the lawbreakers, “nice guys” finish last, won’t someone please think of the man-children over 30, and so on. But then, long after all hope was lost and I feared Phillips was teeing up Joker 3 with, I dunno, Jared Leto as Batman…then comes the final scene, a completely unexpected reversal of fortune for all involved.
It’s no secret the first Joker became a deity of sorts, whose congregation Venn-intersected various amorally warped subcultures. But in that final, radical pivot, you can almost feel Folie à Deux spitting in their faces for buying into a cult of personality. Phillips stands at the finish line and sneers as if he’s pulled off a cynical practical joke with one heck of a long game. I laughed at the sheer audacity. It was the only time I laughed during those two hours and eighteen minutes. Fifteen years ago Smallville pulled the exact same stunt with one of its characters, and it was laughable then, too. It just figures the film’s best joke is cribbed.
That bit doesn’t retroactively make it all worth it, mind you. Joker: Folie à Deux isn’t this year’s worst superhero-adjacent film, but it’s still effectively the conclusion to a deadening two-part performance-art slog, and may be the only film I’ve ever seen where the ending was the only part I liked. And not just because it meant I could scream, “FINALLY!” and flee the theater. I’ve no interest in buying into any new folie à plusieurs that may have been inspired in its wake.
…
Meanwhile in the customary MCC film breakdowns:
Hey, look, it’s that one actor!: Beyond Joker, “Harley”, and Gotham, the only other recognizable DC IP in sight is Harry Lawtey (HBO’s Industry, The Pale Blue Eye) as the multiverse’s dullest Harvey Dent. They might as well have called his featureless prosecutor Hamilton Burger.
Among the wasted notables in Arkham, former teen Jacob Lofland (Justified, Mud) is older now, and tough to spot as a wannabe hanger-on. The oft-excellent British comedian Steve Coogan (Tropic Thunder‘s doomed director, among other memories) is an interviewer bearing none of Coogan’s redeeming qualities. Ken Leung (Industry, X-Men: The Last Stand) is a testifying psychologist who brags that he only needed ninety minutes to get a read on a kill-crazy simpleton, which still sounds eighty too long to me.
Returning cast members include Atlanta‘s Zazie Beetz for one scene as her bystander-turned-fantasy-girlfriend, mortified to be here; and Leigh Gill (Game of Thrones) as Gary Puddles, the undertall ex-co-worker whom Arthur let live and now badgers on the stand, which Judge Smitrovich allows so we can see where this is going, or something.
How about those end credits? No, there’s no scene after the Joker: Folie à Deux end credits, but they do give Special Thanks to creators Bob Kane, Bill Finger, Jerry Robinson, Paul Dini, and Bruce Timm, regardless of how much of their materials were discarded.
We’re told the Estate of Fred Astaire gave their blessing for use of that extended clip from The Band Wagon, which begs some questions. And I confirmed my suspicion the WB cartoon that begins the film was the handiwork of animator Sylvain Chomet, director of the Oscar-nominated feature The Triplets of Belleville (and a 2015 Simpsons couch gag). This new short is the least amusing cartoon since that one time I tried American Dad, but maybe that prologue was also laugh-free on purpose? I’m losing track of which downsides of this film can be explained away with “We meant to do that!”